I was thinking of buying an HDMI cable while I was at Best Buy in the States one day and saw that they were a bit pricey (around $60), albeit from a good brand.
I looked them up locally and I found a "generic" one for something like $20.

This got me thinking: How much of a difference would there be depending on the cable quality? Is a $50+ worth it to connect a laptop to an 32" HDMI tv?

What do you guys think?

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yea, i told my parents that and they were totally amazed that a $120 monster cable offers no benefit over the cheaper cables

funny you said that nekro, cause that's exactly what i told them. they are used to analog where signal quality matters. i told them with digital, it's either there or it isn't.

There actually can be a difference between Monster cables and ones from Monoprice, but only in very, very specific circumstances (long distances and wall mounting). For 99.99% of cases, the cables from Monoprice will do just fine. One of my relatives bought an HDTV and got a free Blu-ray player with it. He was duped into buying a Monster HDMI cable. I told him to take it back, went online with him to Monoprice, and he got the same length of cable for $8 shipped.

There actually can be a difference between Monster cables and ones from Monoprice, but only in very, very specific circumstances (long distances and wall mounting).

Could you expand on exactly what kind and how big differences will I see when running a HDMI cable for a "long distance"? And what distance are we talking here? Isn't it always the case of "digital signal = either it's there or it isn't, nothing in between"?

Reason I ask is I WILL run a long HDMI cable in the foreseeable future.

This article contains three links to other articles detailing how even a digital signal can degrade and under what circumstances.

Interesting read, but those tests mentioned in the articles were controlled by noone other than Monster. Those diagrams on the testing equipment could have represented just about anything.

Also the reviewer doesn't mention what kind of "cheap HDMI cable" was used to measure it up against the Monster one. Was it even certified? All we know is Monster handed it to him. Also, why didn't he take still shots of the supposedly worse vs better picture quality of Chicken Little viewed through the different cables?

If those articles were meant to convince me then they failed miserably. Of course this doesn't mean I am biased against Monster- it's just that I haven't been convinced yet. But if that happens I'll be among the first ones to make sure I grab a "high-end" cable instead of a cheap one.

I liked this comment by the way:

Quote:

"I am a ASIC designer and a Verification engineer (chip design/verification if you don't know what ASIC stands for) and I can tell you that digital signals don't usually degrade over the distances most people use HDMI for. (under 25 ft)
I did HDMI receiver verification for a major telecom vendor last year, and I can tell you, the cable need not be of any higher quality than a USB cable! In fact, the packet structure is much simpler for HDMI than USB, with a good reason: HDMI carries image data, and not much control data (except for very short durations for HDCP, too miniscule to make a difference), and pixel errors in the data amount to one or two per frame at the most, and that happens rarely if at all, and at very long distances, and when it happens, I can guarantee you that you will not be able to tell, because it's just one/two pixel that immediately corrects in the next frame. At 30 frames per second, if you can spot that pixel in that one frame, you deserve a gold medal for having the eyes of a Superman."

There actually can be a difference between Monster cables and ones from Monoprice, but only in very, very specific circumstances (long distances and wall mounting). For 99.99% of cases, the cables from Monoprice will do just fine. One of my relatives bought an HDTV and got a free Blu-ray player with it. He was duped into buying a Monster HDMI cable. I told him to take it back, went online with him to Monoprice, and he got the same length of cable for $8 shipped.

Thanks for the input guys.
As mentioned, I just need a simple cable for whenever I feel like hooking up my laptop to my parent's TV, so I'll just buy the cheap-o cable.

Good call, save the money...nekrosoft13 is exactly right. If the signal gets there than it is the same quality no matter if you paid $3 or $100 from Best Buy. The only differences is in HDMI cables is the new 1.4 "certified" HDMIs can carry a web signal. So if you have a new DVD or BluRay player with an Ethernet connection you can use the 1.4 HDMI to get web TV, if not stay with the 1.3s Monoprice has great prices but I get my HDMI cables from FlyShark mainly because they always answer the phone and actually have people that can answer my techi questions.